Charlotte's blog

One year ago, people slept the night outside County Hall in Truro to protest against Cornwall Council’s plans to cut the Supporting People budget. This funding previously supported many worthwhile projects to help vulnerable adults, including those at risk of homelessness.

The Government’s Supporting People grant to Cornwall for 2011-12 was similar to previous years. Many Councils that received lower allocations somehow found ways to keep Supporting People projects going. But the Tory and Independent led Council in Cornwall decided to include its Supporting People funding in the wider budget and service cuts.

As more people are now sleeping rough in Cornwall – not least, in Truro – there is recognition that the service cuts and gaps are starting to bite, alongside rising unemployment and central Government cuts to housing and other benefits.

Tomorrow, Cornwall Council’s cabinet will consider proposals to part-fund the building of 4000 affordable homes and a homelessness shelter in the next four years. There is a commitment to make 3000 of these homes to rent, towards meeting the most urgent needs on the Council’s housing register.

These short-term goals – and aspiration to extend it to construct 10,000 homes in ten years – are ambitious as well as needed. If it happens, it will as the proposal says bring jobs as well as homes for people in Cornwall.

The explicit purpose of this housing initiative is partly to address the shortfall caused by Government cuts to the Homes and Communities Agency funding for affordable homes. It wouldn’t entirely do that, partly because it is also explicitly designed to bring in future capital receipts to Cornwall Council (as well as partly dependent on securing HCA match funding).

These new proposals are the final appendix in a lengthy pack of Cornwall Cornwall budget documents. Leaving aside its statutory obligations, the Tory and Independent led Council’s motivation seems to be financial as much as social and economic; if the proposals are supported by members, I hope they can be made to work to deliver more of the local affordable homes that are needed.

Update: The Cabinet agreed the housing investment plan.

If the Health and Social Care Bill is passed, public health will be devolved to local authorities from April 2013. A Health and Well Being
Board is being established this year as a ‘shadow’ body preparing for the proposed new arrangements.

In 1979, when the Tories were elected, they shelved the Black report which had been commissioned by the previous Labour Government to research evidence that poverty causes ill health and premature deaths in Britain. The report was eventually issued during the 1980 August bank holiday, and had no impact on UK policy.

The Tories’ legacy by 1997 was one in three children living in poverty.

By 2010, locally, that figure had fallen to one in four Cornish children living in poverty.

Making public health a function of local government is happening alongside clear evidence that coalition Government policies mean child poverty reduction targets for 2020 will be missed.

No amount of healthy lifestyle education can alter the fact that poverty kills. To reduce health inequalities, public health needs funding and administrative powers to remedy:

• fuel poverty and poor housing – at a time when energy companies cannot afford the infrastructure investment needed to switch to renewables;
• risk of homelessness – increased by the cuts to housing and council tax benefits;
• low incomes (earnings or welfare) which prevent people choosing daily fruit, vegetables and protein, rather than high fat, salt and sugar;
• play areas and free leisure centres / transport – people can exercise more by walking etc but there are Cornish children in deprived areas who have never even been to the beach. This is the one aspect that Cornwall Council might have looked at in a holistic way before it decided to privatise the remaining Council-owned leisure facilities and cut local bus services.

The coalition Government is dropping the public health agenda as surely as it did when the Tories shelved the Black report in 1979; and this time, they will be able to blame local Councils, who have no power to influence most of the things that need to change.

It’s rarely mentioned that the introduction of the Localism Bill (now Act) was preceded by Eric Pickles announcing the abolition of Local Area Agreements: ‘So today I am scrapping the existing Local Area Agreements… we are going to give councils what they want – freedom and power – to be able to take your own decisions on housing and planning. That is the foundation of the Localism Bill…’

It wasn’t spelt out how – exactly – co-operation between public sector organisations through Local Strategic Partnerships and Local Area Agreements had diminished the freedoms of local government. And when it came, the public debate about future planning understandably focused more on the draft National Planning Policy Framework.

Partnership working brings with it some additional resource costs for the separate organisations, but most people recognise that co-ordination between public services can be vital, often makes community sense, and also has the scope to enable planned savings.

Cornwall Council bid to lead one of the new ‘whole place’ pilots which – guess what – are now exploring future scope for co-operation between public sector organisations; its unsuccessful bid was called ‘can do Cornwall’.

The Council is now consulting on a strategic planning document known as the ‘core strategy’. Parts of this would take much more than a ‘can do’ Council attitude to deliver.

Through what partnership working or other organisational structure, for example, does Cornwall Council hope to realise its promise to ‘manage public sector service provision to sustainably support the settlement pattern and customer needs’?

That’s a tall order in an area where, regardless of income, many rural residents currently have poor local access to services. The suggestion in the draft National Planning Policy Framework was to locate new housing near to existing services. But the scale of development envisaged by Cornwall Council over the next twenty years means new services would be needed. How is it expected these will be paid for as public sector funding and services are purposefully squeezed and contracted by the coalition Government?

New school buildings in Cornwall which had been planned through Labour’s schools for the future programme were cancelled by the incoming coalition Government. The move towards academies and free schools means any new schools in Cornwall will be reliant on securing national funding through arrangements being managed from Whitehall not County Hall.

Localism has the potential to help us create communities that work and more sustainable local economies; but it can’t be done by fragmenting local service delivery, centralising funding, and removing structures that enabled co-operation between public services.

The latest survey of patients in Cornwall reveals high levels of satisfaction with GPs. From patients’ perspective, the Government’s ideologically driven top-down changes to the NHS make no sense.

In so far as this Government has any democratic mandate, it was partly based on the people who voted for the now democratically bankrupt Tory pledge of no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS.

Like many PCT areas, organisational changes on the ground and commissioning boards in Cornwall have now been placed by the Government in the uncomfortable position of ensuring NHS services continue to meet the needs of patients while surrounded by delays to anticipated timetables for organisational change, and massive legislative uncertainty as the Bill is rightly subject to overwhelming professional and democratic opposition to the proposed changes.

We all know the economy will be an issue whenever the next general election is held.

As the legislative debate of the Health and Social Care Bill continues, it is clear that this Government’s deliberately destructive approach to healthcare – and our most cherished public sector organisation – is likely to be an issue of equal importance for voters.

This may make it Labour turf as Polly Toynbee – whose views rarely concur with mine - said yesterday, but no one in the Labour Party would choose to reach that point only at the expense of patient care and satisfaction with the NHS services we all rely on.

You know that game called Consequences, where names, what they said, and what happened next are compiled into random stories mostly to comical effect. Recently I discovered there is a similar game called Mad Libs, in which names and comments are also added randomly to a story with typically unrelated actions and consequences.

Politically, it reminds me of the coalition government, partly because the Liberal Democrats inclusion was so random in electoral terms. And so many of the Government’s actions are unrelated to either Party’s manifesto. But also because of the way in which many Liberal Democrats – not least, Cornwall Councillors – would so much rather behave as though the consequences of their Government’s actions are nothing to do with them.

Unfortunately the consequences of their actions are all too predictable in hurting most the people – and places – who can least afford it.

It doesn’t take independent research to show in Cornwall that people with least are being hit hardest by Tory and Liberal Democrat cuts (although that is what it says); it can already be seen amongst other things in the growing demands on local food banks.

This month, cuts to housing benefit come into effect. It is clear that in Cornwall this will particularly affect people below the age of 35 in self-contained accommodation, who will lose housing benefit. Nationally, there are fears that housing benefit cuts will lead people without work to move to places with cheaper rents, less buoyant economies and fewer available jobs. In Cornwall as elsewhere, Shelter predict cuts to housing benefit will increase homelessness.

In Cornwall, Labour and European investment had positive impacts – Cornwall’s economy grew ahead of the UK and SW average, and unemployment fell including a 90 per cent fall in youth unemployment. Cornwall was the only UK region to receive EU convergence funding because our economic output was lower; much was made of previous increases in Cornwall’s Gross Value Added (GVA). But the latest GVA figures (from 2009) show Cornwall’s recovery stalling as our economy began lagging further behind in the bottom five. (Even though in 2009, with Labour in government, the UK economy had started to climb out of recession, and unemployment here currently remains below the UK average.)

Investment and jobs growth, as well as the minimum wage, made a difference for many workers in Cornwall. But latest figures show local wages, which had started to rise, are about 80 per cent of the UK average. Reduced hours and Government pay freezes affect many people working in Cornwall. And as people have less to spend, businesses are feeling the pinch too. Business leaders and Trades Unions in Cornwall are united in their opposition to proposed regionalisation of public sector pay.

Cornwall needs a strategy for economic growth and jobs, which the Tories and Liberal Democrats are failing to construct.